The Beeb has *RENAME but it’s strictly a filing system command, usable by BASIC, rather than being a Basic command, and not all filing systems necessarily have it. It’s not so easy to build such a command programmatically, until Basic 4 which offers OSCLI().
I think BBC Basic always allows CLOSE#0 to flush all buffers. I’m not sure if *DISK is in fact always the same - bearing in mind that’s changing the filesystem and not necessarily re-selecting the current one.
The layering in the BBC Micro whereby the MOS is distinct from BASIC and both are distinct from the current filing system is a potential trap for the unwary, and a mistake online can bring pedantic corrections!
It seems BASIC (M$) at that time jumped from simple, to complex with graphics and floppy
disk. Mainframe BASIC never had that but often matrix math. It looks like Microsoft was the standard
since 8 bit micros were becoming the future, rather than mainframes.
Before MicroSoft was BASIC used
for more than a simple calculator? Games were never permitted on time sharing. The PDP8 did have a few games how ever.
But remember that Mainframe BASIC and micro BASIC were two very different animals - even though both were called BASIC.
Mainframe BASIC was compiled and didn’t have nearly the resource constraints that 8-bit micros had. Mainframe BASIC was often run on systems that had a full OS and some sort of fast storage.
Micro BASIC was interpreted instead of compiled, had direct access to the hardware, did not run on systems with a full OS (usually) and were very resource constrained - both in memory and storage.
But micro BASIC became the standard simply because it was in front of more people. Most people didn’t have daily access to a mainframe system, but once they purchased their TRS-80 or Commodore PET, they had BASIC at their fingertips 24/7.
From their micro BASIC evolved as the home computer evolved - supporting graphics, floppy drives, hard drives, etc.
Then IBM brought out their PC and that changed everything.
Yeah, the BASIC started as a “mainframe” timesharing language, how it got cut down to microcomputers, and then popularized by IBM/Microsoft, is a strange story. It kept being offered by “main” and “mini” frame vendors like DEC and HP, and was a “respectable” application development environment.
When I started doing research into the beginnings of BASIC, I saw that Kemeny and Kurtz did not like what Microsoft had done with it and countered it with a product called True BASIC.
But by then, BASIC was waning on the micros with products like Turbo Pascal.
OS/9 for the 6809 had a nice BASIC,C and PASCAL. How ever it took a 16 bit micro to have the power for better programing languages and a good operating system with ample disk space -
dual floppy , or floppy and fixed disk.
They also called the Microsoft-butchered minimal BASIC as “street basic”. It is now Windows only, but back in the 1990s it was available for more platforms (well, when more platforms existed).
I would say they made at least one mistake in trying to make TrueBasic a product that came with a price tag. That was never going to work given the marketing gorilla of Microsoft.
There was also Business BASIC and several other dialects for minis including BASIC-11 for PDP-11, Wang BASIC etc. Some months ago I stumbled on Business BASIC, but I don’t remember why.
Of course they can’t be all included on the chart, mainly for homecomputers